ART CITIES:London-Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin in 1940. His mother, Adelina Marchisio, supplemented her income as a violinist with an embroidery business. In January 1967 Boetti had his first exhibition in Turin, featuring a wide array of works made from heterogeneous, prefabricated materials. In September 1967 Celant included him in an exhibition alongside five other artists, labeling their work Arte Povera.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Ben Brown Fine Arts Archive

An extensive survey of Alighiero Boetti’s “Arazzi” in on presentation in London presenting from monochromatic to multi-coloured, from pre-1979 to more recent and of different formats and sizes. From 1971 to 1994 Alighiero Boetti embarked on a series of projects with Afghan embroiderers, creating monumental pieces that would become some of his most iconic works. When Boetti first traveled to Afghanistan in 1971, he was already regarded as a leading practitioner of Arte Povera. Taking up part-time residence in Kabul from 1971 to 1979, Boetti was surrounded in the streets and markets by Afghanistan’s extraordinary traditions of embroidery. As early as his first visit, he began commissioning new works in this medium. Boetti and his assistants transferred designs to pieces of cloth that were then taken to the embroiderers. The women’s skilled needlework and color choices strongly influenced the final appearance of the works. Boetti’s embroideries fall into three general categories. The most celebrated are his “Mappe”, wall-sized world maps with countries filled in with the colors and symbols of their flags. In the late 1970s and early 1980s Boetti initiated production of the “Tutto”, a sequence of ambitious embroideries featuring myriad interlocking shapes representing diverse objects. The third category of embroidery is “Arazzi”, colorful grids of letters that spell out phrases (such as “Order and Disorder”) amidst otherwise random lettering. These works feature evocative expressions and messages, some in Dari (the language of Afghanistan) and some in Italian, that can be “decoded” by reading the letters in the various directions Boetti arranged them, sometimes in vertical columns, backwards, around the borders, e.t.c.

Info: Ben Brown Fine Arts, 12 Brook’s Mews, London, Duration: 9/2-28/4/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 10:30-14:30, www.benbrownfinearts.com